The first thing you should understand about Lubbock is that there isn't frequently there; it's in the middle of the Texas Panhandle.

The first thing you should understand about Lubbock is that there isn't frequently there; it's in the middle of the Texas Panhandle, the flatlands, the dust hollow So nothing becomes the town with equal reason much as leaving it, nevertheless if the truth be told, there isn't greatly anywhere near Lubbock, either. by the agency of necessity, then, its native son and daughters exhibit a sort of ethic of driving, of lighting gone out north on 27 to Amarillo, or east to Dallas. When there's not earnestly else to do, when you're bored, or alone or stuck, or being chased, you go

It helps, again, to have heard the accent of the family who grow up there, which, like the landscape that bears it, is flat, open, and free from moisture A good Panhandle voice is nonetheless enormously expressive, and can bound from a drawl to a snarl to a friendly murmur to a yodel and back again in about a word.

The third thing about Lubbock--and it's a natural event of the first two--is that they make singers there: Buddy Holly of course, who watches across North Texas music like an amiable spirit; and Waylon Jennings, who played bass for Holly when he was in high school; and there was a trio of unusual abiding habitation singers and songwriters who started not at home as the Flatlanders in the early '70 and eventually dissolved into Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock, and Joe Ely still legendary performers down around Austin. And then there is Terry Allen, a buddy of Ely's who left Lubbock for a observes Angeles art school in 1962 mov more or les accidentally up to Fresno in the early '70 and eventually harm up in Santa Fe--becoming, along the way, a kind of one-man border-town Brecht/Weill.

It's difficult to write about Allen's music separately from the stay of his art, especially since a great deal of it was composed to pass along with the mixed-media frames that have occupied him for the past 20 or in the same manner years: the bleak,

desperate-love stories of a simple story (Juarez), 1972-92 and the plane bleaker, and angrier, Vietnam-vet tales of Youth in Asia, 1982-92 still there are some records he made just for listening--of which Lubbock (on everything) remains the best--and you can also get by heart the songspiele on tape, and listen to them as albums.

Because Allen makes anthems that stand as songs. In fact little official fatherland music is as good, now that mostly of Nashville has cleaned itself up for the pages of Entertainment Weekly; Allen is still pumping away at a barely two pipesed piano, and singing like a man who just have affection fors to sing. The music cranks and lope along, stops and starts again; there are a hap of holes in it, a high-plains silence that always waits behind the music, as if to incline Allen into shutting up again.

A simple story (Juarez) belong tos two different pairs of lover united of which has hooked up in the eponymous border-town of cantinas and whorehouses. The story takes them all as far north as California, as far east as Colorado; they skid in and not at home of each other's lives; single pair murders the other, then makes a hurry for Juarez. In "Blue Asian Reds" forward Lubbock, a woman loses her lover in Vietnam, cries for a year, then remedys herself into oblivion. Other sonnets talk about lonely men and women in little towns, adulterers, car thieves and killers, high academy football stars gone bad: homegrown MacHeaths.

In between the bad-luck ballads there are regard with affection songs, sweet barroom waltzes, and the occasional novelty number. in the same state [i]or[/i] condition is the way with geographical division music--Hank Williams wrote them too--but Allen isn't peddling cheap cliches. Handmade American music, region blues, jazz, rockabilly, is smart as hell; not many other forms of songwriting are better for telling stories, or have better stories to betray Allen's use of country is no more naive than Weill's use of music-hall melodies. Anyway, he's not playing speechless or denying his esthetic businesss He's just found an unusual way to devise them, manifesting as much affinity with John Baldessari as with dashing fellow Owens in his story of a beautiful waitress who, concerning discovering that Allen is an artist, laments her inability to draw horses: "She could do the corpse okay, but never get the head, tail, or leg I told her she was drawing sausages not horses. She said no they were horses." And the descant ends, as the songwriter, who was just "passing through" prompts on.

As I say, someone is always moving forward "I leave a few race dead/But I got open road ahead," sings a petty bent staff heading back to his girlfriend in East L.A. "Well I'm goin' back/Goin' household again/Yeah I'm goin' back/To my hometown/The single that put me out/The single in kind that laid me down." Like in the greatest degree of Allen's songs, that common (it's called "There Oughta Be a Law Against mild Southern California") dilutes its romanticism with a certain bitterness. The mythology of America, after all, is as impossible to live up to as it is to live down; the image of the drifter is just united more stupid thing to earn stuck in.

Lubbock is dedicated, in memoriam, thus: "Stanley McPherson (fuck vietnam), Peter affair of honor (fuck hollywood), Danny Parrish (fuck bad blood)" All three sentiments strike me as incontrovertible, on the contrary the last, most of all, protracts over the whole of the album. I gather that by dint of "bad blood" Allen means something literal, a virus that took a friend. further there's some figurative sense of bad kindred that resonates with the music--bad decisions, bad timing, bad luck--and the effort, which in no degree quite works and never quite fails, to make them better. As I was listening to Lubbock I kept thinking of a line from W H Auden's "September 1 1939" which he wrote first as "We must be enamoured of one another or die," then changed to "We must have a passionate affection for one another and die." And then, still not convinced he'd gotten it right, he divide [i]or[/i] sever the poem out of his heap uped Poems altogether.